Word: plautus
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...only a very cursory one at Shakespeare's. The Comedy of Errors, upon which The Boys is loosely based, never was one of the Bard's greatest creations anyway-he hadn't traded in his slapstick for lofty rhetoric and sublime poetry yet. Besides, he cribbed the plot from Plautus, who in turn had lifted it from the Greeks, so Rodgers and Hart were obviously working within a clearly established tradition...
...which Rubens based squarely on his study of classical art. As a young man in Rome, he made a sketch of every antique marble he could lay eyes on. His vast correspondence shows that he had read and memorized work by almost every known Latin writer, from Cicero to Plautus. He recommended "a complete absorption in statues," but "one must avoid the effect of stone." Rubens' large altarpiece, still in Antwerp Cathedral, of the Descent from the Cross, 1611-14, demonstrates exactly what he meant. The figure of Christ, the pale, dead God sliding down the cross into...
Adapter-Director Burt Shevelove and Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim have teamed up to employ Aristophanes as a springboard for the sort of romping farce that they achieved together with a Plautus original in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The result this time, while thoroughly amiable, is more tentative and less hilarious, chiefly because the Aristophanic model does not offer as robust comic material as the Plautine...
Indeed, upon inspecting Segal's Roman Laughter, a study of the Roman Plautus, one finds in the very first paragraph of the Introduction, a brief put-down of all the "serious" scholars who find Plautus insignificant...
...begun to recover from the emotional shell-shock resulting from everyone's over-reaction--including his own. After all, his persona scholastica does include a Guggenheim Fellowship, nearly two dozen articles and reviews, a collection of essays on Euripides, Roman Laughter, the first study in English devoted entirely to Plautus--Rome's first comic playwright--as well as English translations of Plautine comedy. An extensive treatise on Terence, a kind of sequel to Roman Laughter, remains unfinished as Segal develops new insight from recent findings of the Greek playwright Menenader which may place the whole of Greco-Roman comedy...